Pakistan Dismisses, U.S. Condemns, War Papers Leak

National Security Adviser James Jones said the release of the documents by the website Wikileaks could put lives at risk and threaten national security. Photographer: Kris Connor/Getty Images

July 26 (Bloomberg) -- Pakistan said the disclosure of
about 92,000 classified documents on the war in Afghanistan
wouldn’t affect its relations with the U.S. or its role in the
conflict after the White House condemned the leak.

“These things have been regurgitated from time to time by
the media or by low-level officials without any endorsement by
the U.S. government,” Farhatullah Babar, the spokesman for
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, said in a phone interview
from Islamabad. “There is nothing much in this.”

The “irresponsible” release of the documents by the
website Wikileaks could endanger lives and U.S. security,
National Security Adviser James Jones said. The documents date
from 2004 through 2009.

A theme in the reports is allegations that Pakistan’s main
intelligence agency is secretly aiding the Taliban and allied
Islamic militant rebels whom the U.S. is trying to defeat,
reported the New York Times, the London-based Guardian and the
German magazine Der Spiegel, which say Wikileaks gave them weeks
of access to the documents. The group opposes U.S. policy in
Afghanistan, according to a White House statement.

“The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of
classified information by individuals and organizations which
could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and
threaten our national security,” Jones said in a White House
statement. Wikileaks “made no effort to contact” the
administration about the documents, he said.

New Strategy

Jones said the documents cover the period leading up to
President Barack Obama’s change of direction in the war in
Afghanistan, which was begun by former President George W.
Bush’s administration after the Sept. 11 attacks by al-Qaeda.

“On Dec. 1, 2009, President Obama announced a new strategy
with a substantial increase in resources for Afghanistan, and
increased focus on al-Qaeda and Taliban safe havens in Pakistan,
precisely because of the grave situation that had developed over
several years,” Jones said.

Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan said the U.S.
military is just starting to assess the significance of the
leaked material.

“We’ve only seen a fraction of the documents that are
purported to be out there,” he told reporters. “Until we get a
look at all of them, we can’t know exactly what the extent of
the damage might be” to the safety of troops and information
gathering.

Classified ‘Secret’

“These documents as they have been described are at the
‘secret’ level -- not ‘top secret’ or higher classifications --
so there are any number of people who have access” to them,
Lapan said. The documents seen so far represent “the kind of
reporting that goes on at the tactical level on a routine
basis,” he said.

U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague, speaking to reporters
at a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels,
said the leaks were largely irrelevant and wouldn’t alter U.K.
war policy.

“We’re not going to spend our time looking at leaks,”
Hague said. “We are going to carry on with the internationally
agreed strategy. They should not be damaging to the
international effort.”

The Times said the reports suggest that members of
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate had met with
members of the Taliban to organize militias to fight against
U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan and plot assassinations of Afghan
leaders. Babar said the Guardian reported no “smoking gun” to
prove covert Pakistani aid to the Taliban, which has been
alleged for years by retired U.S. officials who have worked on
Afghanistan, and by independent scholars.

Karzai’s Contention

The documents buttress years of contention by Afghan
President Hamid Karzai that the anti-Taliban fight is being
hampered “by the cases of civilian casualties and by the role
that ISI has played in destabilizing activities within
Afghanistan,” Karzai’s spokesman, Waheed Omar, told reporters
in a press conference today, referring to Pakistan’s spy agency.

“Most of this is what we always have raised with our
international partners, and this will now help to raise more
awareness,” Omar said.

“However illegally these documents came to light, they
raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy
toward Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Senator John Kerry, a
Massachusetts Democrat who chairs the Foreign Relations
Committee, said in a statement. “Those policies are at a
critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the
stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right
more urgent.”

Skelton’s Comment

Representative Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat who is
chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said the
documents are “outdated” and, under the Obama administration’s
“new counterinsurgency strategy implemented earlier this year,
we now have the pieces in place to turn things around.”

“Pakistan has significantly stepped up its fight against
the Taliban” and “there is no doubt that there have been
significant improvements in its overall effort,” Skelton said.

Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, called
the leak of the documents “irresponsible” and said they
reflected “nothing more than single-source comments and
rumors.” The Pakistani government is “following a clearly
laid-out strategy of fighting and marginalizing terrorists,” as
a strategic partner of the U.S., Haqqani said in an e-mail.

The leak got little coverage today from Pakistan’s TV news
channels and newspapers. The English-language daily, Dawn,
published only Haqqani’s dismissal of the leak.

Heat-Seeking Missiles

The documents show that Taliban insurgents have used
portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft,
something that hadn’t been disclosed by the military, the Times
said. The reports also provide information about secret commando
units seeking to capture or kill top insurgent leaders, and the
use of CIA paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan, the
newspaper said.

The reports suggest that the Taliban’s use of heat-seeking
missiles “has been neither common nor especially effective;
usually the missiles missed,” the Times said.

The Times called the documents an “incomplete record” of
the war. While the Times said the documents don’t contradict
official accounts of the war, the newspaper also said at that
times the U.S. military had made misleading public statements.

As examples, the Times cited attribution of the downing of
a helicopter to conventional weapons instead of heat-seeking
missiles and giving Afghans credit for missions carried out by
special operations commandos.

Civilian Deaths

The Guardian said the documents show that allied troops
have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. In
addition, it said, “Taliban attacks have soared and NATO
commanders fear neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the
insurgency,” referring to the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denied that his
country is supporting the Taliban in an interview aired tonight
by CBS. He said the root cause of Afghanistan’s problems was the
U.S. military presence there.

“We do not support any group,” Ahmadinejad said from
Tehran. “We only support the Afghan people. We want to
strengthen security in Afghanistan, and we think the Afghan
people should run their own country.”

Der Spiegel said all three publications vetted the
documents, compared them with independent reports and concluded
they were authentic. The reports were mostly written by
sergeants, Der Spiegel said.

‘Gloomy Picture’

“Nearly nine years after the start of the war, they paint
a gloomy picture,” Der Spiegel said. “They portray Afghan
security forces as the hapless victims of Taliban attacks. They
also offer a conflicting impression of the deployment of drones,
noting that America’s miracle weapons are also entirely
vulnerable.”

Jones said the disclosure wouldn’t alter the White House
course in the almost 10-year war.

“These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing
commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and
Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the
aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people,” Jones said.

The Times said it took “care not to publish information
that would harm national security interests.” The newspaper
said it withheld “names of operatives in the field and
informants cited in the reports” and “avoided anything that
might compromise American or allied intelligence-gathering
methods.”

Wikileaks Described

The newspaper described Wikileaks as “an organization
devoted to exposing secrets of all kinds” and said the group
provided the publications with the documents “several weeks
ago” on condition that nothing be published until July 25.

Wikileaks is an organization of Internet network volunteers
in more than a dozen countries who obtained and conducted an
assessment of the documents, the Washington Post reported.

Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, said at a press
conference in London the documents “don’t include top-secret
papers” or most reports from U.S. special forces, the CIA or
reports by coalition partners.

“We have tried hard to make sure this material doesn’t put
innocents at harm,” he said. All the documents are at least
seven months old and “of no operational consequence.”

Assange said it’s “too early to say” whether the
disclosure will influence the course of the war or help or
hinder a drawdown of troops.

“It’s clear it will shape an understanding of what the past
six years of war has been like, and the course of the war has to
change. The manner in which it needs to change is not yet
clear,” he said.